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Growing human populations and higher demands for water impose increasing impacts and stresses upon freshwater biodiversity. Their combined effects have made these animals more endangered than their terrestrial and marine counterparts. Overuse and contamination of water, overexploitation and overfishing, introduction of alien species, and alteration of natural flow regimes have led to a 'great thinning' and declines in abundance of freshwater animals, a 'great shrinking' in body size with reductions in large species, and a 'great mixing' whereby the spread of introduced species has tended to homogenize previously dissimilar communities in different parts of the world. Climate change and warming temperatures will alter global water availability, and exacerbate the other threat factors. What conservation action is needed to halt or reverse these trends, and preserve freshwater biodiversity in a rapidly changing world? Freshwater Biodiversity offers the tools and approaches that can be deployed to help conserve freshwater biodiversity.
Preface
1. The Freshwater Commons
2.Global Endangerment of Freshwater Biodiversity
3. Overexploitation
4.Alien Species and their Effects
5. River Regulation: Impacts and Mitigation
6. Vanishing Lakes and Threats to Lacustrine Biodiversity
7. How will Climate Change Affect Freshwater Biodiversity?
8. Ecosystem Services and Incentivizing Conservation of Freshwater Biodiversity
9. Conservation of Freshwater Biodiversity: Opportunities and Initiatives
Index
David Dudgeon is Chair Professor in Ecology and Biodiversity at the University of Hong Kong. He has spent almost 40 years researching and writing about the streams and rivers of monsoonal East Asia, and the animals that live in and around them. He is well known and well respected internationally in the field of freshwater ecology, on which he has published extensively. He received the Biwako Prize in Ecology in 2000, and was Editor-in-Chief of Freshwater Biology between 2015 and 2017.
